Karissa Chen debuts her first novel, Homeseeking, at the Harvard Book Store
Chen shares the inspiration and research behind her book in a conversation moderated by Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author.
On Jan. 13, Karissa Chen visited the Harvard Book Store to introduce her debut novel, Homeseeking. In a conversation moderated by Celeste Ng, the New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You, Chen captivated the audience with a moving excerpt and reflected on the research behind the novel and the photo that inspired her to write it.
Published on Jan. 7, Homeseeking is a historical fiction novel that follows the story of two lovers, Suchi and Haiwen, as they meet in childhood and are torn apart by the Chinese Civil War. When Haiwen enlists in the Nationalist army in 1947 and leaves for Taiwan, he doesn’t expect to be gone for decades. “Following Suchi and Haiwen across decades, borders, and lifetimes,” the book is a story of family, sacrifice, and the power of enduring love.
Though Homeseeking is Karissa Chen’s first novel, it is not her first creative endeavor by far. Her fiction and essays have been published in magazines like The Atlantic, Eater, and The Cut. She is also the current editor-in-chief of Hyphen Magazine, which is dedicated to Asian American stories, and previously served as the senior fiction editor at The Rumpus, an online literary magazine.
The event kicked off with an excerpt: Chen read from the second chapter of her book, a three-and-a-half page scene set in a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles in 2008, where Haiwen meets Suchi for the last time. The scene follows Haiwen as he sees her across the grocery store floor and cautiously approaches, having “mistaken so many women for Suchi over the last four decades.” It turns out that Suchi has just moved to LA a couple of years ago to help take care of her grandchildren. A brief conversation ensues, where the two share small talk on Haiwen’s recently passed wife, Linyee, and his new American name, Howard.
The scene was both beautifully written and beautifully read. Chen’s descriptions of the setting and the characters place readers squarely in the midst of the scene. A frequent customer of Asian grocery stores myself, it was easy for me to imagine the Korean melons Suchi is occupied with when Haiwen sees her, “their skins the color of lemon curd.”
Chen’s portrayal of lost love is convincing: though the interaction is brief, both the familiarity and distance between them is clear. Suchi speaks to Haiwen in Shanghainese, their childhood language, and an “aching relief” runs through him. Yet time has made them foreign to one another: “People call me Howard now,” Haiwen says, and Suchi struggles to pronounce his new name. Chen read this dialogue with empathy for both characters, resulting in an enrapturing experience.
Ng followed with questions about the book’s origins. “The genesis of this book really came for me all the way back in 2005,” Chen explained. “My grandfather had passed away then, and we were going through his things, and we found this photograph of him weeping in front of his mother’s grave.” For Chen, her grandfather had always been a stoic Asian grandfather, so to see him weep haunted her. She knew her grandfather was separated from his family at 19, but she didn’t know the context of the story, and this compelled her to start doing research.
She learned about the Chinese Civil War, a military conflict in the late 1940s between the Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that the CCP ultimately won. Her grandfather was one of 2 million people, some as young as twenty, who fled Mainland China for Taiwan to help set up a new government, believing they would stay for only a few years. Most ended up staying for decades. As Chen lamented, they “had left behind families, children, parents, lovers, [and] wives.” The more Chen understood her grandfather’s story, the more she realized there were other stories like his.
To research the stories of these people who had left behind their lives in China, Chen went to Taiwan to learn more. Though she had hoped to interview Nationalist Party members who were members of this exodus, she found that she was too late. The soldiers of that generation had already passed away or weren’t in good health, and many were unwilling to talk about their experiences. “Instead,” Chen stated, “I found people who were willing to talk about their parents… or even grandparents, in some cases.”
Chen found that these generations were much more willing to talk about what had happened; they, too, were trying to put the pieces together. “People would say they found out all kinds of things about their fathers that they didn’t know because their fathers never wanted to talk about it.” Some of Chen’s interviewees even found out in their forties that their fathers had a whole other family.
When asked how much of this history she knew before researching the book, Chen admitted that she didn’t know much. “I didn’t really know that there was a Chinese civil war… I didn’t know about the history of how the Nationalists ended up in Taiwan. There’s so little that I knew, which is such a shame, because it’s my own history.” Ng added, “We really don’t learn any of that in school.”
Another unique feature of Homeseeking, beyond its historical backdrop, is its timeline: Chen tells Suchi’s story forwards, from childhood to old age, and Haiwen’s story backwards. Though Chen believes the structure works well, she struggled with it: “For a while, I was really stalled out because I didn’t know what the structure was going to be like.” At a month-long writer’s residency, she came to a revelation while listening to Jason Robert Brown’s “Last Five Years” album, a musical about a couple getting divorced. The first song starts with the woman singing about the end of her marriage, and the next song features the man singing about their first date. They eventually meet in the middle, and then separate again. Chen thought, “Wait a second, I think this could work for the book, because it not only works on a structural level… but it works thematically.” Suchi, whose storyline runs forwards, prohibits herself from dwelling on the past; Haiwen, whose storyline runs backwards, regrets what could have been.
Karissa Chen is not yet planning any future projects. Having just had a baby, her next goal is to work on photo books of him, which Ng called “a beautiful full circle, because this book started with a photo of [Chen’s] grandfather.” Though Homeseeking is a work of fiction, what Chen hopes readers will take away is that Suchi and Haiwen’s story exemplifies the experiences of real immigrants who went through the same hardships. “Sometimes we can react to immigrants and refugees with suspicion or impatience,” she stated. “I just always hope that at the very least, this book can make you a little more empathetic to that struggle… and understand that there’s a lot that we don’t see.”